by Jane Delury
They sat down on the beach. “Show me where you’re from,” Rado said.
Bernadette told him the name, drew a map of France in the sand with her finger and pointed to the north. “It wasn’t much of a village to start with and it was destroyed during the war.”
“Your family remains there?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t been back since I was a girl.” She smoothed out the map. “Some families are meant to be left. Besides, Paris is nicer.”
“I’ve always wanted to see Paris,” Rado said. “The grave of Baudelaire.”
Was that the beginning? The opening? Would he bring up not having enough for a ticket? Could she lend him the money? Was that how this kind of thing went? In the hospital, she’d interrupted her husband’s deathbed confession and said, “Stop talking.” If only he had told her years earlier, when she was a young woman, maybe she would have left him, or maybe she would have stayed. Maybe she would have had her own affair. She didn’t know. He had robbed her of the choice.
“My apartment is in that quartier,” she said, and then wished she hadn’t.
Rado looked up at a coconut tree. “Tu en veux?”
She nodded. And then he was gone. Feet flat on the trunk, he climbed toward the fronds. His heels looked tender against the leathered trunk. She felt a twinge of pity. Here, or in France, he would rise to become head of a school district. He would wear bow ties.
A coconut thumped down beside her. “Too close?” Rado called.
She picked up the coconut and handed it to him when, breathing heavily, he returned to the ground. “Why are your eyes full?” he said.
“You make me think of someone.”
“Ton mari?”
“No,” she said. “He was afraid of heights.”
Then the moment was gone. He was Rado again, and she was this woman in the sand, not that girl in the forest.
After husking the coconut, Rado slammed the point of a pocketknife into its eyes. He pressed the coconut to Bernadette’s mouth, and the water spilled over her chin. She pushed the coconut away. He kissed her neck.
“Don’t,” she said.
He put the coconut to his own mouth and drank.
“I’m sorry,” he said when he was done. “It’s too soon for you. My grandfather has been gone ten years, and still my grandmother can’t look at his picture without weeping.”
“It’s not that,” she said. “I’m not thirsty.”
“So let’s not drink.” He threw the coconut down the beach and leaned in to her again. Her heart was thumping. She unbuttoned her shirt.
The morning that Gabriel didn’t arrive, she sat in the pergola until she heard the sound of the widow’s car. She walked the logging road to the main road, through Benneville, to Gabriel’s farm. He was in a field with his father, digging potatoes. He looked up at her and then went back to jamming his spade into the dirt, but not before she saw the bruise on his neck. She stood on the road, watching him and his father dig. When she opened the door to her house, her father yanked her into the kitchen. He said that she was no better than a putain. He’d talked to the boy’s father, and that was the end of that. Her mother was sobbing at the table. “How could you do this to us,” she cried, as Charlotte called from her crib in the other room. A week later, the women at the market said that the Italians who sold the chickens had moved away. They owed thousands of francs to the bank for their farm, apparently. What could you expect from Italians? They were all a bunch of dirty cheaters.
Bernadette and Rado were seen walking back from the beach, without bags or towels, her hair unattached, her hand in his. That evening, at dinner, the women couldn’t look down the table without imagining that elegant mouth on Bernadette’s. Rado, too big for his chair, seemed to them dangerous and fragile. In Bernadette, as she passed the bowl of salad and salted her fish, the women watched for some sign of regret, but she was straight-shouldered and quiet, her hair back in its chignon. Each of the women, for her own reasons, was resolute. They went to bed having decided what they must do.
The next morning as Bernadette left class, the director called her into his office. When he was done talking, Bernadette said, “You patronize him. Is it his youth or his color?”
“It is the abuse of power,” the director said. “You’re his teacher.”
“We did nothing wrong,” she said. That was all she would give him. She had decided so at dinner the previous night as she and Rado were bathed in sidelong stares. Or maybe the preparation started earlier, when she walked away from her roommate without answering the woman’s question.
“I’ll go,” she said. “Leave him be.”
Outside, she passed students reading under a baobab tree, playing a game of checkers on the grass. She thought of the papers being stacked and blackboards being wiped behind the cloudy classroom windows. What would they talk about now? She walked, head up, gaze straight, just as she’d walked the road out of Benneville one night, pockets filled with money from the till in her father’s garage. She followed the main road until her feet hurt, to the convent that stood by the river, where she gave the name Bernadette Léger. She spent seven months scrubbing floors and washing habits, praying for the redemption of her soul. Her water broke in the chapel. She closed her eyes from the first push, and squeezed them tighter when the pain was over and the room filled with the cries of what, a nun told her later, had been a boy.
She sat in her room by the window, bags packed, and watched the sky drift down into the trees. She could still feel the softness of Rado’s hand as they’d walked back from the beach. When he started to let go as the trees thinned for the buildings, she held on tighter. For the first time since his death, she felt tenderness for her husband.
“You shouldn’t have come,” she said after opening the door to Rado’s knock.
“They’re too busy toasting their victory to notice.” He sat on the edge of the bed. “I know you took the blame. Your roommate told me.”
“She saw it coming.”
“What will happen to you?”
“Nothing of consequence.”
“You threw yourself on the sword,” he said. “Why?”
It was the first time he’d asked a real question about her, and for a moment she believed that they were what he seemed to think they were: tragic lovers. Then he smiled and she wasn’t sure what he thought.
“I leave that to you,” she said.
When his first book was published in France, some of the women sought it out and others stumbled upon it. He was the only writer in the history of the island to win such a prestigious award. They flipped through the pages in bookstores, in bed, on the couch, looking for something they recognized. They didn’t know where truth ended and poetry began. They didn’t know if Rado climbed a tree to pick a coconut or if Bernadette punctured the eyes with her thumbs. Did she undress him like a mother? Did a thicket of palm fronds grow over the sky? They didn’t know if the ocean claimed the empty shell, which floated around the Horn of Africa and past the icebergs of the north. They didn’t know if the coconut still traveled, studded with barnacles and bleached by salt. There was so much they didn’t know.
Years later, she saw a poster with his photograph as she walked with her granddaughter back from the Jardin des Tuileries. Shakespeare and Company présente le deuxième livre de Rado Koto. The next night, she stood in the back of a crowded room at the bookstore, propped on her cane. Rado looked sickly at the podium, his jaw gaunt and his eyes too deep as he read his poems, which were different from those of his first book, similar to the ones he’d once shown her in his notebook. Beautiful but hard, she thought, then with frustration and now, she supposed, with disappointment.
The reading over, he sat with his American translator, signing the French edition as his translator signed the English. She handed him the copy of his book.
“Je le dédie à qui, madame?” he said, after glancing up at her.
“To Madeleine,” she said.
Half Life
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2000
One September evening, when Kate came home from her job at the Grenoble Museum of Art, there he stood in the garden, next to the boxwood hedge. He was long, predatory: a wolf, she thought at first, illogically, but no, that was a dog. His right front leg had a hole like a knot in a tree, and his fur resembled an old shag rug. One of his eyes was partially closed; he seemed to be sizing Kate up. She stood on the path, satchel in hand, and wondered if the dog might be rabid. “Shoo,” she said, then, “Va-t’en!” In response, the dog limped over the grass to the bench by the door and, after turning three times, curled up underneath. He was still there the next morning, even though Kate had propped open the gate. She left him a bowl of water, and added a plate of steak haché the next night. By the third day, she’d accepted that the dog was not going to budge.
“He’s giving me the stink-eye,” her housemate, Georgia, said. They were having breakfast in their small backyard, at the picnic bench that Kate had scavenged from one of Grenoble’s antiquaire shops. When they’d come outside, the dog limped from under the bench and lay in the grass at Kate’s feet.
“I don’t think it does that on purpose. There’s something wrong with its eye.”
“Among other things.” Georgia sucked an udon noodle through her cupped tongue. She’d heated up leftover Japanese and was cross-legged on a broken chair, her robe parted to show a strip of crotch. “The fucked-up dog of a fucked-up human.”
A week before the dog appeared, the police municipale had dispersed a homeless encampment on the Bastille, the fortified hill behind the house that Georgia and Kate rented. The homeless migrated to Grenoble during the summer, playing guitars and fiddles on street corners, mangy dogs like this one often sleeping nearby. They were not gypsies. They were Europeans on foot who roamed the EU and ended up in Spain or Portugal for the winter. Kate and Georgia had surmised that the dog had been separated from its owner and wandered down the hill, into their yard, to find food.
“I certainly can’t keep him,” Kate said. “My one experience with a pet was a disaster. A hamster. It escaped its cage. The cleaning lady thought it was a mouse, and she whacked it with a broom.”
It was Kate who had neglected the latch on the cage door. The hamster frothed at the mouth and staggered in its wheel for two days. Her mother said maybe the hamster only had a concussion and would recover. “How could you do that to her?” her father had yelled at her mother when he returned home from his business trip. “Can’t you take care of anything?” He told Kate that he would get her another hamster and that she should go up to her room. As she walked up the stairs, Kate heard him ask her mother for a plastic bag and a hammer.
“Maybe he’s the reincarnation of that hamster.” Georgia sucked up another noodle. “Your second chance.”
“I didn’t kill the hamster,” Kate said. “I don’t need another chance.” Georgia might be vulgar and not perfectly educated, but she displayed an innate intelligence. In her early thirties, like Kate, she worked at the English bookstore in the city, which catered to the University of Grenoble’s large student population from the British Isles and the United States, young people drawn to the city mostly for its proximity to the Alps and the good skiing. She had a wild, free-ranging sex life, the details of which she enjoyed sharing at breakfast after spending the night elsewhere. She said that monogamy was an institution meant to keep women down and that she had an elevated level of testosterone manifested by her ring fingers being longer than her middle fingers. Currently she was in an S&M relationship with a bartender at Le Couche Tard who made sculptures out of bicycle rims. Although Georgia was endlessly more interesting than Kate on the sexual front, Kate knew that her bohemian sparkle hid a shadow of desperation. It was the greatest act of intimacy to share a bathroom, Kate thought sometimes, and it was only after a few weeks of living with Georgia that she’d noticed the acidic smell in the bathroom near the bidet and connected it with the empty carton of Carte d’Or ice cream in the kitchen trash can or the tarte au citron that Georgia had suggested they eat straight from the box while watching a movie. Kate now understood Georgia’s Modigliani body, which she’d claimed to keep trim through hot yoga and la gymnastique. Although she liked Georgia, Kate would not want to be her for anything, and she was not thrilled that in certain ways—age, unmarried status, job status, and housing situation—she was.
“Have you told Monsieur Havre about the dog yet?” Georgia said. She referred to Kate’s boyfriend, Alexis, by his surname, because, as she put it, he was square as a napkin. “You’ll make him nervous. He’ll think you want a baby. First the dog, then the baby.”
“I’m not having kids. Alexis knows that. And the dog will be gone by the time he gets here. I’ll put up signs.” At Kate’s feet, the dog let out one of its high-pitched sighs.
That afternoon, Kate stood in the phone booth outside the museum for her weekly phone call with Alexis. They had a routine well established, just as they’d had when Alexis lived in Grenoble. A morning email, a nightly email, and the weekly call. Kate had woken up that morning to a description of the drive Alexis made back from Lapland to Stockholm, where he was spending a year doing a postdoctorate. He would return to Grenoble to visit her in three weeks.
“Bonjour, mon chou,” he said through the crinkle of static. “Tu as toujours le chien?”
“Salut,” she said. “Dog still around. Did you find anything?”
“Peut-être, but we have to wait for the soil sample results to be sure.”
Alexis’s PhD at the University of Grenoble had focused on ionizing radiation; for his postdoctoral study, he was creating a map of the fallout left by the Chernobyl cloud as it had traveled across Western Europe, from Ukraine to the Atlantic Ocean. On their first date, two years before, at a couscous restaurant in the quartier arabe, he’d described how the cloud skimmed mountaintops and rained onto fields in Sweden, Switzerland, and even Scotland, where sheep registered radiation in their milk. Mushrooms in a certain region of Austria should be avoided, along with the wild boar of the Vosges. “There are areas right near here,” he said, in the Parc national des Écrins. His blond hair shagged around his clean-shaven face, and his eyes looked smart and aware behind his glasses. He was both passionate and calm. Kate had been on too many dates both in Grenoble and back home in the U.S. with men who leaned over the table to convince her of their fabulousness. Alexis stopped himself before he went on too long, shrugged, and said, “Anyway, what about you?”
Over the next year and a half, before he left for his postdoc, one night together a week became three. A good-night phone call every other day became a good-night phone call every day. After six months, as they sat in the sculpture garden of the museum, where Kate managed the gift shop, Alexis said, Je t’aime, and Kate said it back. Alexis told her that she was the first woman he’d actually loved—“because you don’t have expectations, except that we shouldn’t cheat on each other.”
The women he’d dated before, he said, kept giving him ultimatums. They wanted him to say he loved them within the first few months. They wanted to move in together, to get engaged, to get pregnant before they turned thirty.
“How can you know if you love someone when you’re under that kind of pressure?” he said.
Kate understood. Although the light by which she saw many things differed from his—was fuzzier, rosier maybe, less scientific—she believed that relationships were better navigated with boundaries, and that this did not, as one boyfriend had put it, make her “heartless” and “detached.” It made her realistic.
Neither of them wanted to get married or become parents. Alexis said he’d decided a long time ago that the world was too messed up for children. Kate explained that watching her parents remarry five times between the two of them, and accumulating all those stepsiblings whom she barely knew, had made her think that not getting married might be the way to ensure that a relationship worked. “Plus,” she said, “I like my space. As you do.” She could read on the couch
with her feet in Alexis’s lap one night while he watched le foot, and be home in her own bed the next.
At five, she shut the glass doors to the gift shop, locked up the display cases, secured the bronze Degas dancer earrings, aligned the postcards, refolded a Van Gogh sunflower scarf on a table, and headed through the antiquités collection toward the Espace Atelier. The guards were checking the hallways for lagging visitors. She said bonjour and salut, and stopped to whisper-chat with the one in the Art Moderne wing, who was doing a study of Matisse’s Intérieur aux aubergines in a sketchbook, another aspiring artist of which, it seemed, the world and this museum were full.
“I’ll be quick,” she assured him about her visit to the art studio.
“You can spend the night in there if you like,” he said. “There are no security cameras.”
Kate wondered by the way he was looking at her whether he meant she could spend the night there with him. This must happen to Alexis all the time at the University of Stockholm, a treasury, she supposed, of beautiful students. The thought made her feel queasy.
“I have to make a sign about a dog,” she said bluntly, and continued down the hall.